Backbench MP Douglas Carswell played a key role in shaping the localist agenda. He tells Joshua Chambers why the Tory party must combat its own centralising tendencies – and why he enjoys coalition with the Lib Dems.
There are two things civil servants should know about Douglas Carswell, the backbench Conservative MP for Harwich and Clacton. First, his ideas are influential within the Conservative Party and have shaped coalition policy commitments. Second, he finds the civil service unaccountable, and believes that officials and vested interests hold up policy implementation – either deliberately, or because of incompetence.
Influence can be overstated, of course, and in Carswell’s case his traction has proved patchy. He strongly advocates leaving the EU, but the coalition has steered clear of that fault line between the two parties. Carswell also isn’t convinced that climate change is man-made, but the prime minister has declared that the new government aims to become the “greenest ever” and sees anthropogenic global warming as a clear threat.
Yet on other policies Carswell has played an important role in shaping the government’s thinking. Just last month, David Cameron wrote in the Guardian: “The drive for devolving power is shared right across the coalition. For years, Liberal Democrats have campaigned for a more local politics. And in the Conservatives, MPs such as Douglas Carswell have led the way by developing radical policies on decentralising power.”
Carswell has written a number of pamphlets and books, one co-authored with eurosceptic MEP Daniel Hannan, which call for power to be devolved to a local level by putting government data online, increasing accountability, and giving power away from central government to local communities. These themes have since become central to the coalition’s ideology, and some of Carswell’s specific plans – such as electing police commissioners – are now being put into practice.
Who thinks what?
Carswell is a Conservative, but he’s glad to be part of a coalition government. “What is notable about being in coalition is that we have people sitting with us who’ve not only been very good on wanting to devolve power, but have a vested interest in making sure we deliver on it,” he says. In Carswell’s view, the Liberal Democrats will want to be able to show that, after decades in opposition, they’ve used their time in government to produce some tangible achievements for their supporters.
If the Tories weren’t in coalition, Carswell thinks, they wouldn’t be so concerned with political reform. “If this was just a Tory majority government, I would say that the radicalist streak would gradually fade over time because that terrible ancient Tory vice of centralism would have to come to the fore,” he says. Carswell argues that his party is divided between those who believe that reform requires power to be devolved – the “Googleists”, who seek to democratise information – and others who think that existing bodies merely need to be run more efficiently – the “technocrats”.
Follow the money
The coalition states that it is pursuing a ‘localist’ agenda, and wants to push power down from central government to local communities. However, it hasn’t yet demonstrated that it’s ready to sacrifice its own powers in order to empower local authorities.
I question Carswell on the policy put forward by communities secretary Eric Pickles, which gives Pickles the power to insist on a local referendum if a council seeks to raise council tax. “You’ve hit the nail on the head,” Carswell says. “Everyone is a lip-service localist now. and the question is: are they a genuine localist? To me, the litmus test of localism is the extent to which central government is prepared to hand over control of the money.”
Once again, he sees coalition as an advantage. “The Liberal Democrats have historically been very good on giving councils greater control over how they raise money – they’ve been talking about reforming council tax for as long as anyone can remember. I hope this is where being in coalition allows us to be far more radical.”
The government is reviewing local authority funding, he says; “one of the most potentially exciting things happening”. Carswell states that 93 per cent of all taxes in the UK are collected centrally, but he wants government to ask “what revenue streams can we easily give cheaply and effectively to metropolitan councillors and county councillors to collect”. VAT could be turned into a local sales tax, he argues (the EU might object, but this wouldn’t overly distress Carswell); or fuel duty could go straight to local authorities.
Defence difficulties
Carswell wants power to be devolved to local people because he doesn’t trust the civil service. This is not to say that he trusts local public sector workers more – he doesn’t – but his vision is one of a Britain run by elected leaders, or by officials who are more closely overseen by MPs.
The story of defence procurement, he argues, shows why greater accountability is needed. “There’s been catastrophic and monumental incompetence in the Ministry of Defence, and I note that very few people seem to have lost their jobs,” he says. “In the private sphere that would be intolerable, and I think it should be intolerable in public administration.”
A couple of days after our interview, the National Audit Office released a report which showed that poor decision-making has created a gap between defence spending and funding of anywhere between £6bn and £36bn over the next ten years (see news). Carswell says that these sorts of problems arise because there is “zero effective scrutiny” of how the MoD spends its money.
“If you’re not accountable for how you spend money, you don’t spend it as effectively,” he says. However, in the case of the MoD, he also believes that there’s a form of “protectionist racketeering, where the contractors are able to exclude rival bidders who would be able to supply kit more cheaply”.
Carswell thinks that failures occur not just because of the work of current civil servants, but also because former civil servants return to lobby their own department on behalf of the private sector. “There is a revolving door between the upper echelons of the MoD and big corporations,” he says. His solution to this is for the private sector roles of former senior civil servants to be published online. He dismisses the current Advisory Committee on Business Appointments as “inefficient” and a bunch of “Whitehall grandees”.
Carswell, who has a rather military gait, pursued his interest in defence through the Armed Forces Parliamentary Scheme – akin to a cadet scheme for MPs – but was forced to leave after he criticised the quality of the equipment he had seen and attacked the funding of the scheme by military providers.
Most recently, he sought to become the first elected chairman of the defence select committee, but was defeated. Nonetheless, this was an important move for him; Carswell believes that select committees hold the answer to making Whitehall more effective.
Committee questioning
Carswell wants all senior civil service appointments, including permanent secretaries, to be approved by select committes. “We are a parliamentary democracy,” he says. “Parliament is supposed to be able to oversee Crown appointments.”
We turn back again to the MoD, as he puts the case for officials to have to annually argue for their department’s budget in front of a select committee. “If the defence select committee had annually approved the MoD budget, we wouldn’t have seen the catastrophic misallocation of taxpayer money that we’ve seen at the MoD, not just in the last couple of years but over the past 20 or 30,” he says.
“In most proper democracies,” he concludes, “members of the legislature exist to oversee how taxpayers’ money is spent.” Given Carswell’s influence on shaping his party’s localism agenda, civil servants would be wise to take note of his ideas about the future of British governance.